The Disco Blog

I recently ran across an interesting company called uTest, which aims to leverage a social network of distributed software testers for testing client applications. The basic premise being that if you’re building a software application, why not outsource the testing of it? Outsourced testing is by no means new; however, what appears unique with uTest is that they will test your web application (this is key– you control the environment; that is, you provide them a URL, which dramatically lowers the “set up” costs associated with outsourcing testing) and then you choose the team (this is based upon various aspects such as the person’s location, experience, and even platform). uTest provides bug tracking and apparently you only pay for bugs you approve.

What’s more, via their trippin’ dashboard, which reports various aspects related to testing (number of bugs, number of testers, etc), they also report application “maturity”– that’s fairly intuitive and speaks to the business user in a friendly manner. Without such a metric, you are often left deciphering other related metrics and inferring application readiness.

With uTest, you can also rate testers– this is super hip– essentially, testers in their network are paid by defect. You have to approve defects and what’s more, when you approve one, you can rate a tester– presumably, testers with low ratings fall out of favor within the network and those with higher ratings become more valuable.

Outsourced testing, for many companies, is often a no-brainer– I’ve facilitated these transactions before; however, what’s particularly interesting about uTest is the social aspect of it. Rather than a client relying on the outsourcer to build a test team, the client, in this case, builds the team themselves. What’s more, building the test team is facilitated via the community and the ranking of testers within it. Also, an often big barrier with testing is environmental set up– often times the outsource company will want to set up things in house. This process takes a lot of effort and is often times quite costly. Putting that responsibility on the client definitely lowers a barrier.

uTest’s crowd sourced functional testing just might work– keep an eye on them. Of course, if you find yourself in need of a hip QA team, these guys might prove to be quite cost effective too. Dig it, man?